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Critics call Veet's 'Don't risk dudeness' ads sexist

UPDATE: Veet has pulled the ads from its YouTube account, Mashable reports. The company doesn't appear to have offered any comment, and one of the ads is still available on YouTube via another account.

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Veet, maker of hair removal wax strips, recently released a series of questionable commercials that have provoked an unholy trinity of epithets from critics: tasteless, sexist, homophobic.

The ads are aggressively targeted to women, featuring the tagline “Don’t risk dudeness.” The implication is that in Veet’s world, anything less than a perfectly hairless woman is essentially a man. Check out this gem:

Jezebel was certainly not amused. The site summed up the inherent problem with the ads: “Despite the fact that both men and women have body hair, the campaign reinforces a standard of beauty dictating that body hair is only for men.”

A Tuesday Facebook post featuring one of the ads has drawn nearly 1,000 comments, most of them critical of the brand, and some of them including photos of women who are letting their body hair grow in protest.